Removing a feature that fixes a major shortcoming of your product (spam sites) and directing your customers to use an extension to fix it is awful.
What faith I once had in Google being a company that puts users first is long gone.
Blocked Sites is discontinued
41–50 of 141 posts
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#42Was that feature really that indispensable? I can usually get away by refining my search query, and more often that not, using the minus sign solves the problem.
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#43Back when the Chrome plug-in shipped (it preceded Blocked Sites by a bit) I compiled an extensive list of content farms as a starting guide for people wanting less spam in their SERPs. If you're migrating over to the extension it's worth a look (and as always, any new suggestions for the list):
http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farm...
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#44I guess I need to go back to manually appending "mdn" to all my html/css/js-related queries. How much longer is w3schools going to stay at the top of those results? EDIT: Actually, it turns out I've been using the linked Chrome extension (went to install, discovered it was already installed). I just conflated the two services and forgot about the extension. So to make this productive, I recommend this extension. I ha…
In Chrome you can just add something like
https://www.google.com/search?q=mdn+%s
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s
to the bottom of you search engine list with shortcut letters of your choice (e.g. "m")
chrome://settings/searchEngines
Then typing "m query" into the omnibox is even faster than resorting to google first.
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#45I'm curious how all this "wood putting" is affecting staff attrition/layoffs.
If had invested my work into one of the major cut projects, I'd be fuming as an employee right now.
Also, it's interesting how many of the cut services seem to be around working, but slowly decaying and abandoned projects. It says something about google's ability to keep working on and developing products...especially since most of their products are essentially public betas.
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#46As many others, I used this mainly to block w3schools from my searches. Disappointing to see it go.
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to various sources, Larry Page had occasion to speak with Steve Jobs and ask his advice--in general terms--a few months before Jobs' death. Jobs originally wasn't inclined to give Page his time (he was still bitter about Android) but felt that, as he had reached out to an earlier generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs himself, he should pay it forward. Jobs' advice was to focus on the most important pro…
Works great for a company that risks generating a lot of noise to consumers (i.e. producing and marketing physical products). But for Google it's pervasiveness and breadth of services were part of the appeal, it's not like it's minor products interfered with the major parts of the company nor cost them much to maintain.
The niche services that have been killed were (by definition) used by small groups, groups which tend to be over-represented here and on other tech-oriented outlets. Even a service like Reader was something that only a small number of people used (compared to e.g. gMail).
One way to look at it is that these services are now validated (if small) market needs that smaller entrepreneurs can pursue. In the past, entrepreneurs lived in fear that Google would muscle in on their specialty; now it looks like they not only won't do that, but are in fact disengaging from things that do not have mass market appeal.
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#48Not surprising, as the feature hasn't worked for quite some time, despite still being available to configure within your settings. I am disappointed however, because there are quite a few sites on the Internet that I would much rather not see at all, ever again. They are the noise in my search for signal in my Google search results. And the entire point of switching to Google way back in the day was the quality of th…
I can't even count the number of times I've attempted to block every variant of "w3schools".
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#49Not surprising, as the feature hasn't worked for quite some time, despite still being available to configure within your settings. I am disappointed however, because there are quite a few sites on the Internet that I would much rather not see at all, ever again. They are the noise in my search for signal in my Google search results. And the entire point of switching to Google way back in the day was the quality of th…
[deleted]
Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued
#50I don't understand why this was discontinued. Surely this data would be a gold mine in improving the quality of search results, which is core to what Google does.